Today marks seven years without you. I never got to meet you, not even through a sonogram. You were gone too fast. I had a glimmer of hope for my future, despite what it would mean for my life to have a baby, when I hadn’t even completed eleventh grade yet. Yes, it would be an impossible task, and I thought that maybe this could be my wake-up call. I decided by lunchtime the day I found out about you that I would recover from my eating disorder. I would do my best to be a good mother to you. And then just as quickly as I’d gained that hope, I lost it. A large piece of myself shattered into a quadrillion pieces that day, and while some of the pieces have been repaired, the majority are still lost in the vastness of space. I never got the honour of meeting you, and when it’s my time I believe I’ll get that chance. 

I will forever wonder what my life with you would have looked like. I picture you cuddling with Edison (my family’s puppy). I picture you at the river with me and your step-dad. I picture you on the back of my paddle-board while I guide us down the river. I dream of you growing up content with life and all it has to offer you. I’d give you the best I had to offer. There are so many questions that I have that will forever go unanswered. Would I have maintained my recovery after you were born? Would I have started abusing drugs if you were in the picture? Would you have picked up on your mother’s struggles? 

What I do know is this: you would want me to continue living my life. ‘Moving on’ won’t ever really happen, and you understand this. I will always think about you and the what-could-have-beens. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I can see you. Your strawberry blonde hair, stormy grey eyes, and you already have long legs just like your mother. When I look closer at the scene around me, I notice your playful nature, which I’d attribute to your Auntie Kally. 

If you had been carried closer to term, and had survived, what would my life today be like? I can’t say for sure, and I do picture him taking us for car rides. I picture us reading Harry Potter together as a family. I picture telling you the story of how I met your dad. And at the end of the day, I know you’re where you’re meant to be, even though it saddens me that you’re not by my side. I will never get to see your smile or hear your laugh. 

For a long time, my only wish was to join you. I thought that was the only way my soul could be at peace. And yet, I have moments in which my soul is at rest, even while alive. I’m at peace when I’m at the beach, or when I go for a nice swim in the lake. Or when I’m out on the paddle-board gliding through the water. These moments help me get through the stronger waves of grief that continue to afflict me. Writing also helps to soothe me, by reminding me I can still have a relationship with you, just not in the way I’d wish for. I write to you, and I’m working on a novel in your honour. And while it still hurts, I’m trying my best to live the way you’d want me to. A life in recovery. 

At the end of the day, I am forever your mum; a mother to an angel.